Denis Hills
NEITHER Krystyna Kawecka's Journey Without a Ticket (Fineprint, Nottingham, £6.90) nor Janek Leja's Janek (co-author A. Dowling, Ringpress, £14.95) would claim great literary merit, but they give memorable accounts of the hardships suf- fered by Polish captives in Stalin's wartime Russia. Both of them almost perished from disease and starvation, Krystyna while working on a primitive farm in Uzbekistan, Janek in the Arctic wilderness of a penal colony in Vorkuta — survival kit, he says, was a soup bowl, a piece of wire for hanging it over a fire to heat snow water, and some string to tie his ragged clothes together. Their eventual release with General Anders's army in 1942 and their post-war resettlement in Britain make a happy ending, and are evidence of how our rough island stock continues to be enriched by the best immigrants. Another Pole, Radek Sikorski, in Dust of the Saints (Chatto & Windus, £14.95), describes his adventures as photographer and reporter with the Mujahedin guerrillas in Afghanis- tan. He dissects their mentality, their cruelty, their fanaticism and loyalties. Guerrilla war makes for 'dirty' fighting — as was the case in Smith's Rhodesia, where the majority of casualties were among women, children and non-combatants `caught in cross-fire'. Sikorski consoles himself with the thought that the Afghan rebels were resisting the same rule as Poland, which he fled in 1981: 'their cause was mine'.
Artemis Cooper has caught the glamour, the pettiness and paradoxes of the Cairo scene in her Cairo in the War (Hamish Hamilton, £16.95). Many soldiers hated the place and its rat-race for staff appoint- ments and promotion, and they much preferred the desert. The clack of typewri- ters in the improvised cubby-holes of GHQ, the night clubs and Gezira Lido, the elephantiasis, dung, flies and trachoma, the gossip and political intrigues, the doings of Sir Miles Lampson and King Farouk, are all present in her often irreve- rent account of the sahib in wartime as a base wallah on the banks of the Nile.
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